The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Mafia started again, and I’m playing again! This put my mind squarely in Mafia territory, and I found myself working on a set of Mafia rules while I went about and did my thing this evening. Here’s an attempt to get them down in a first draft. When/If I actually present it, I am going to flavor text the fuck out of it even more, don’t you worry. If you have opinions, tell me what you think.

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Mafia Complex: Paranoia Mafia

-The Following Flavor Text is RED-Clearance-
MISSION ALERT!
Your friend and ours, Friend Computer, has summoned its mightiest RED-Clearance Troubleshooters here to the Troubledome to attempt to remove traitors from our beloved Alpha Complex once and for all! And you’ll see it all, right here, on So You Think You Can Troubleshoot Survivor Idol! And here come our Troubleshooters now!

Due to the wild and amazingly badass shootout before the show (not pictured) our poor Troubleshooters are only left with 3 clones apiece! Can they manage to find the horrible traitors in time? We’ll find out, because they’re not leaving the studio until your leader and mine, the one and only best friend we all have, Friend Computer, says they are done!

—All Information Past This Point In This Post, Unless Otherwise Stated, Is Ultraviolet Clearance—

Friend Computer has gathered you all here to try a new, improved Troubleshooting method, one that’s 12% more humane, according to early tests in R&D. Friend Computer suspects each and every one of you of belonging to a traitorous Secret Society, thanks to Int-Sec moles within secret societies who report their activities daily. As Troubleshooters, you find trouble, and then shoot it. Friend Computer, in its wisdom, has instructed each of you to find Secret Society members and shoot them with a new type of weapon, called “Lynch Voting.” Even better, Friend Computer has decided that it would raise morale in Alpha Complex .06% to televise use of this method as a brand new reality show, making the entire experience extremely public. All Troubleshooters must report to the Troubledome every morning to vote and decide who Friend Computer will execute. This will continue until Friend Computer believes there are no Secret Society Members left. There’s only one way any Secret Society members are going to get out of this spotlight: by removing everyone not in their society, so that there’s no dissent when they tell Friend Computer there are no traitors left.

That basically means that Troubleshooters are the Town, and Secret Society Members would be the Mafia. Just to be clear.

Each day, everyone will vote on which Troubleshooter is actually a member of a Secret Society. At the end of the day, the person who has the majority of the votes will be executed by Friend Computer. If there is not a clear majority decision, every single player with at least two votes against him or her will die. Friend Computer, in its wisdom, knows it’s better to be safe than sorry.
There will then be a night phase. Members of a secret society may talk to one another during this phase, but no other conversation between players is allowed. Secret Society members will pick one Troubleshooter to kill. At the end of the night, whoever is picked will die.
Days will last the standard 72 hours, or 24 hours after a majority is reached, whichever is soonest. Nights will last the standard 48 hours.
Nobody can die more than once in a day or night.

Along with Secret Societies, Alpha Complex is also plagued with traitors of another kind: horrible mutants. These mutants can have strange and terrible powers. However, they are not always reliable. After the first use in a game, every power is subject to dice rolls to determine it’s effectiveness. This is represented through a failure rating. A first use in the game will always work. The next one will require a roll to pass with the failure rating as set. If the rating was 50, for example, a 50 or higher would have to be rolled on a d100 in order for it to work without a problem. Each use after the second raises the failure rating by ten. Yes, that means that, eventually, there will be no way for the power to go off without a hitch. Failure does not always mean the power does not “work.” It is different for each horrible mutant ability. Some examples follow.

Machine Empathy: The Worst Thing, a Machine Empath can make Friend Computer feel feelings, and manipulate those to get something out of our beloved leader. This means that a Machine Empath can make an Accusation in the name of another troubleshooter, for whatever reason they want, and have it stick. This is kind of a modified Killer. Failure Rating: 90. Failure Effect: Everything goes through, but the Machine Empath is outed.

Highlander Syndrome: Although seeming dead, this horrible mutant will, instead, get back up once without using up a clone. This will not be announced, but those keeping track will potentially pick up on it. This is a passive ability. Failure Rating: 100. Failure Effect: Nothing happens.

Telepathy: Using powers of the mind, this terrible mutant can send a secret message to another person. The sender of this message will not know who sent it, unless the mutant includes their identity in the message itself. Failure Rating: 10. Failure Effect: Everything goes through, but the Telepath is outed.

Flesh Pockets: This mutant’s body is covered in pockets made of their own flesh, which is perfect for carrying things while naked, or for performing sneaky slight of hand tricks. In the current situation, one of most useful of these tricks would be switching lynch ballots at the last minute, while nobody is looking. This mutant can publicly vote however he or she wants, and it will show up as the recorded vote. However, this mutant can make a “real” vote, cast in secret, and it is this secret vote which will determine the outcome of the day. This may be hard to spot unless their vote changes the outcome of the lynch. Failure Rating: 50. Failure Effect: Though not officially outed, the real vote is documented, and not the fake one, in vote tallies.

Compulsion Enhancer: Able to mentally tap into the needs of others, this mutant can create incredibly intense needs to do particular actions in their victims. When activated, the mutant picks an action that can be described in 8 words or less. Examples would be “Vote for shivam with no explanation,” or “Type only in orange text.” The target of the mutant’s ability must follow this order, to the best of their ability, for the rest of the phase when it is used. They cannot confirm, deny, or mention that they are being controlled. Failure Rating: 80. Failure Effect: The target learns the name of the mutant attempting control, does not have to follow the order, and may talk about being controlled freely, if they wish.

Memory Vampirism: With a touch, this horrible mutant can receive visions of past events related to the object at their fingertips. This is most effective, of course, when used on a person-object, otherwise known as a dead body. This mutant can determine any secret society affiliations of any dead clone. This is an active ability, however, so they must pick and choose who to examine. Failure Rating: 0. Failure Effect: The mutant still gets their information, but they are outed.

Xerox Vision: With just a look, this twisted mutant can copy the abilities of fellow horrible mutants. When used on a target, the mutant loses the Xerox Vision ability, but gains the horrible mutant power, if any, which the target possesses. The target does not lose their ability, and does not know they have been affected by Xerox Vision. The target’s power is only copied on the mutant’s current clone, though. A future clone with Xerox Vision has Xerox Vision, not the copied ability. Counters of how many times a power has been used persist throughout copies. A mutant who copied an ability, used it, died, then copied the same ability would be on the second use of the copied ability as far as rolling for failure is concerned. Similarly, that second copy would have had to pass a failure check to have gone off. Failure Rating: 70 Failure Effect: The mutant loses Xerox Vision on this clone and does not gain a new mutation, but knows what power, if any, they would have received if the power had not failed. The target is told Xerox Vision has been used on them, and who used it.

There is one more thing that anyone can do: they can send an accusation of traitorous behavior to Friend Computer at any time during the day, as many times as they wish. Int-Sec agents must do this as part of their job, but Friend Computer knows that the citizens of Alpha Complex must be vigilant if they are going to stamp out traitorous activity wherever it is found, and will gladly listen to any citizen. If backed up with evidence that proves the behavior (links to posts, images, etc.) then Friend Computer will have the accused executed at the end of the day, along with a public explanation of who made the accusation and what the evidence was. If the evidence is not sufficient, it will still be posted and reported, but no execution will take place.
-The Following List Is RED-Clearance-
Here is a list of traitorous behavior.

Being a member of a Secret Society.
Not enjoying the taste of New Diet Bouncy Bubbly Beverage.
Being a mutant or using a mutant power.
Contradicting Friend Computer.
Not answering the Daily Survey.
Lying to or disobeying Friend Computer.
Using or communicating knowledge you do not have clearance for.
Being unhappy, most likely due to not taking your daily Mood Adjustment Supplements.
[LIST ENTRY NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR CLEARANCE LEVEL]
Making too many accusations.
Not following the rules of the game.
Forming labor unions.
-Thus Ends The RED-Clearance Section-

Everyone in the game has 2 spare clones, waiting in the wings. When they die, their clone comes in to take their place. You have three lives, essentially. Because Friend Computer knows that most citizens are good citizens, and that death is a fantastic teacher of good behavior, it does not assume that clones of the same person carry the same affiliations or mutations as previous versions. Evidence against a dead clone is, therefore, not going to be sufficient evidence to convince Friend Computer to execute a Troubleshooter.

The Troubleshooters win the game by killing all the Secret Society Members. A Secret Society wins by having a majority of the remaining Troubleshooters being members of the society.

Keep your laser, er, lynch vote handy. Trust no one. The Computer is your friend. Trust the Computer.

Today I had a little breakdown.

I came home from a busy day in St. Louis to find my mother in the computer room, having disassembled the modem and router setup. This strikes fear into my heart. I try not to react too harshly, as I know she’s trying to help. I ask her what this means about me relaxing with my food before work. She tells me I can’t relax, and that if I have time to relax I should help her, because I need to unhook everything else in the room and get it out of there so she can work.

I freak out even more at this, because the carpeting isn’t getting put in until Thursday. I’d be computerless, probably, until at least Friday afternoon under this plan. I attempt to figure this out, and she tells me that she needs the cables out of here, but that I should hook the router back up so she can use her laptop. I know this is her trying to lighten the mood, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I decide to try to compromise, and start taking apart all my game systems and my TV. I won’t be able to play any games, but I’ve been too depressed and busy to anyway, so maybe that’s fine. In doing this, I knock over the closet door she has precariously perched on the wall next to my computer. It slams into my computer tower. I freak out, and turn on the computer to check it. It makes a horrible noise. I open the case, see no issues, close the case, it still makes the noise, I freak out more. Finally I notice a wire knocked loose. I fix it. It works. I start crying.

In some ways, I feel kind of lame for reacting like that. In others, I feel completely justified. Life sucks right now. I am trying my best, but fuck. I am pretty unhappy. I can only really unwind in here. This is where I can hide from things and recover. This is where I can calm down. But I can’t even have that anymore. I can’t even have anything. All because of this stupid carpet, and everything going on. Everything. I can’t have anything.

I mean, that’s not true. But fuck. Everything I have to fight for. Every little thing.

After this silly thing, people were asking me if I was okay. I was shaken. I’m still shaken, though I’m steadier now. Being able to type like this to you, having access to my friends and my daily routine with this computer… it is a lot of what keeps me balanced. Steady. Stable. It helps me not be completely depressed. I just…

Fuck.

Instead of the vast amounts of entertaining and uplifting television that will make me laugh and smile, I have, instead, been watching Puella Magi Madoka Magicka.

I think about to when I would buy so much manga, and I was so into the animes and the various things that are just like them. I think about now, when I can barely make myself consume any media that isn’t a video game, and have very little interest in most of what comes out of Japan, anime-wise. Still, occasionally I pick up on something that really grabs my interest, and I watch it, and I like it. Lesbian Schoolgirls playing Mahjong was one of those things that, the moment I heard about it, I had to give it a view, and got totally caught up in dramatic Mahjong action. Zetsubou Sensei also caused me to check it out, and I enjoyed it’s sense of humor.
Now, a random twitter message along the lines of “Madoka Magicka is what the Persona anime should have been like” was enough to make me check it out. I’m glad I did.

The show starts out like any other magical girl show. In fact, it leans on the tropes very heavily. Here’s the opening. On first glance, nothing really seems wrong with this opening, and the show begins, and things are very, very stereotypical. You have a vision of the future, much like the beginning of Cardcaptor Sakura, and then into Madoka’s normal life, which is very normal.
Then a mysterious transfer student pulls Madoka aside and lets her know that, if she tries to be more than what she is, she will die, everyone close to her will die in the most painful way possible, everything she loves will be crushed, and everything will be gone.
Then it goes back to normal.
Eventually there is a fight with an interesting art style, and soon we are at the end of the episode, and we are greeted with something like this.
Then you go back, and you re-look at that opening, and you see how often Madoka is crying, running in terror, or completely depressed in it.

This show is incredibly dark. No punches are ever pulled. When things go bad, they fucking go BAD, and there are consequences for actions taken. Life-changing consequences.

I’m a huge fan of the previously mentioned Cardcaptor Sakura. I love it dearly, with no restraint. But this show is such a counterpoint to the constantly optimistic world of Cardcaptor Sakura. It uses your expectations for a magical girl show to its advantage, and even after it’s used up that advantage, it constantly twists the knife when you think it can’t get any worse. Yet, even through all this, none of it seems unfair. In many ways, the characters are being tortured, but in many ways, while they are good people and bad things are happening to them, it is their character flaws which is ultimately the cause of their downfall.

At the same time as all this is going on, the show is constantly using varied and very beautiful art style changes to denote moods and heighten the experience. Battles take place in a sort of alternate dimension, and the show takes advantage of this to throw all sorts of crazy stuff at you to see. It’s awesome.

The show is about 8 episodes in, but I am completely hooked. It’s depressing as fuck, of course, but it’s so well done. Some people are down on it a bit, and say that the overall story arc is not interesting. It is, maybe, slightly weak, as it’s depending on fairly weak magical girl plots as premises. However, the characters are, of course, what is drawing me in. These characters, though perhaps seeming cliche on the surface, constantly surprise with their depth, and I want to see what happens to them, even if they die horrible, gruesome deaths. I’m in this for the long haul. You might want to join in too.

While I am incredibly bad at it, Settlers of America: Trails to Rails is a pretty cool game. It’s also very impressive in how it is completely accurate to the game it is based on, and yet plays completely and utterly different in actual execution.

In general, the game seems very similar to Catan. You have five resources, and you collect them based on dice rolls and the location of your cities. You can trade them around to build things, or to move units about, like Catan: Cities and Knights. 7s make you discard resources if you have too many, and move a thief around. It’s all extremely familiar.

However, taking the game as another Catan is kind of a bad move, as the changes to the goals of the game change the strategy significantly. Instead of building a certain number of things, your goal is to supply all your goods to rival cities by driving a train to the city and dropping the good off. Each city on the board can only be delivered to once, and you only unlock goods to deliver if you build more cities. Add to that the fact that you can only use other player’s tracks if you pay them a gold each turn you want to use them, and you have a game with a ton of strategy. You don’t want to expand too fast, because you can’t supply your own cities and you’d just be giving your opponents easy access. At the same time, you do want to expand fast to have access to more spaces to get more resources, and unlock more goods. Building rails lets other players have access to your cities, which helps them win, but it also, potentially, gives you a source of gold, which is a good thing.

I really can’t figure this game out. I have been dead, dead last each time I’ve played. Because tracks are not useful for expansion, I tend to ignore them until it’s too late for me to really get in there and deliver goods. I just can’t wrap my head around the balanced approach you really have to apply when playing the game. That doesn’t make it a bad game, of course. I think it’s a rather fantastic game, though it’s quite a lot longer to play than normal Catan. I want to keep trying it, but yeah. It’s complex. Still, people like that. People tend to prefer Cities and Knights to regular Catan because they’re weird.

Today I got fitted for glasses. (Is that the term? Fitted for glasses?) In doing this, juice was dripped into my eyes to dilate my pupils to make sure the doctor knew what was up. What then followed was like 2 hours of me not being able to see well enough to read.

Holy shit, I did not completely understand how much my world is built out of words, but it totally is.

Seriously, it blew me away how helpless it made me feel. I had to ask a woman to dial my mother on the phone for me to pick me up. When I got home, I tried to make myself dinner, but I couldn’t actually set the oven temperature or timer in order to pull it off. The only thing I could do was lay down and listen to podcasts, but I even had trouble working my iPod touch because everything was so blurry.

So I laid there, thinking about it. I couldn’t talk to my friends online because I couldn’t read the screen. I couldn’t play games. Basically all my leisure activities that weren’t podcast-related were out of the picture, and even those were hindered. Not being able to make out letters kind of removed my ability to do the vast majority of things I do with my life. Hell, even my career revolves around this stuff.

It was kind of scary, I have to admit. And though I fully think I would be strong enough to survive and move on, somehow, if I lost my sight, man, there would be very, very little unchanged in my life. Every single thing I do would have to be replaced in some way. Every single thing.

I was pretty happy when I could see again.

I really debated whether or not I wanted to write about this, but I couldn’t stop thinking about things I wanted to say about it, so we’ll go ahead and talk about Flexible Survival.

Flexible Survival is an Interactive Fiction game. It has some RPG elements, and one of the main mechanics is attempting to find enough supplies to survive. You’ve hidden in a shelter after a horrible, nano-machine created apocalypse. However, you didn’t prepare a lot of food, and it’s going to be at least 30 days before any sort of order is restored to this crazy society. You have to start going out and foraging in what remains of the city you lived in. You seek out new places to scavenge, build relationships, and fight battles and level up. Though still being put together, it’s already really functional. It works, and it’s pretty well written.

It’s also totally about lots and lots of furry transformation fetish sex.

Lose a battle? You get raped. Win a battle? Depending on your current state, you may rape your opponent. Every time you have sex with someone, some of their traits rub off on you due to nanomachine corruption, and those machines are constantly working at your brain, to turn you completely into a feral being of lust. Have too much sex with taurs, and you’ll slowly turn into such a beast. Have too much sex with the opposite sex, and you’ll start to grow another set of genitals. Play with a goo girl? You might find yourself turning into a slime creature.

Most of the time, when you have something like this, it’s purely masturbation material, and usually not that great. It’s not written all that well, or it’s short, to the point, and lacking in world building or general planning. Flexible Survival really doesn’t feel like that. Your body can be in I don’t know how many configurations, and the setup adjusts the various sex scenes to reflect this, and for the most part these scenes don’t jump out as having parts cut-and-pasted in to reflect the current status of your character. They just seem to work like someone is writing them.
What’s more, there really is an actual game here. It’s still being built, of course. Combat is still coming along, and I didn’t really find too big a variety of weapons in its current state. There’s also a Feat system coming that will let you customize yourself even more as you go along. But it’s seriously an actual game. You have to balance searching for neat content and new foes with searching for food and water. There are, from what I understand, multiple endings depending on the state of your character and what you did through your 30 days, and you are rewarded for all the different types of changes to yourself, as well as being good, uncorrupted, and only seeking out consensual relationships. These relationships aren’t necessarily the deepest things in the world, but there’s enough there to make them feel real enough, in the context of the game. You could buy that these people would like to spend time with your character, and aren’t just being items that respond to the command “fuck x.” (Though, you know, they do respond to that command.)

Basically, I am just really impressed. Usually when I see this much work put into a furry porn project, I am partially confused at why this was the thing they spent their time on. But this is, easily, better constructed than some non-porn-y Interactive Fiction I have played, well-conceptualized, and, if you’re into the sort of thing in there, is pretty exciting. I was linked to this game kind of at random, but it really got some claws into me. The extremely NSFW link is right here if you would like to try it. (I put it at the end so you’d be sure to know what you were getting into before you went there!) I personally hope it continues to be updated for awhile. A little more polish all around, and a wider variety of encounters, and you’d really have something special here, if only for a fairly niche audience.

Okay, so, this isn’t about porn or about Magic cards, but that’s because things happened. Grandma is in the hospital with a broken hip. It’s, as I put it in a conversation earlier, an un-good situation. You’ll also have to excuse me if I don’t want to write about it at the moment.

However, after seeing my Grandma in the hospital, I went to my Poetry Workshop, as I do on Wednesdays. After being all emotional in the parking lot, I went to class and did my workshop thing. I cracked jokes. I literally had the whole group pausing to laugh and catch their breath at several points. I gave out some good feedback. When I finally left, I realized that I felt a lot better. I was happy.

This coming after the night before, where I covered for Lynn and ran her workshop by myself, and had a complete and utter blast. It was so much fun, and I think I did a great job at running that, as well. The night before that, I wrote a speech about pedagogy just for the hell of it and delivered it, which was an enjoyable experience.

Seriously, there’s a lot of work and bullshit involved in education, and I’m never going to be rich. But seriously, the more I do this kind of thing? The more I get involved and get to really do it? The more I know this is, by far, the right career path for me. I can do this over and over again. I can enjoy it. I know what I want to be when I grow up.

That’s something, anyway.

Of course, first order of business before all that: get everyone back to healthy status. Here’s hoping.

I’m deeming Operation: Get More Sleep a failure.
It isn’t a failure because I wasn’t getting more sleep. I was. It’s a failure because it’s dramatically cut down on my work efficiency.

I find that, more and more, I only get work done in the mornings. Once the afternoon hours hit, I am either busy being social, or busy hiding, eating, and trying to eek out a little relaxation before a busy evening. I can’t make myself focus on work then. I’ve tried, with limited success, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Yesterday, I woke up early. Really early. And I graded a huge stack of papers, wrote a speech to give later that evening, set up an appointment with a name change lawyer, and had my appointment in St. Louis. Many of these were things I had been trying to get done all weekend, but felt stuck, depression-wise. But I knocked it all out this morning, and had time to talk with Cara about things, too.

Yes, I’m going to have to spend more mornings getting up early and knocking shit out if I’m going to succeed, get this thesis done, and so on.

Therefore, I declare Operation Get More Sleep a failure. Long Live Operation Neversleep!

And with that, ironically, I’m going to bed.

I’ve been playing a lot of Through the Ages. Not in like, physical form. Have you seen the prices for that thing? Also, there are so many pointless counter bits to keep track of, that I assume that actually playing the game would be an accounting nightmare. I still don’t understand all the systems that are running behind the scenes, and I’ve played several games now. Still, once you get the hang of it, it’s a rather fun game with a lot of strategy involved, and I rather enjoy it.

I’ve been playing it on this not very legit-looking website. The interface on the site is kind of awful, but it basically lets you play by e-mail rounds of this game with your friends, and once you figure out how to actually control the game, it works fairly well, when the site hasn’t crashed.

(Seriously, with all the questionable things in the way of me learning this game, I’m amazed I stuck with it and like it as much as I do.)

There are two great things about this game. The first is the wide variety of strategies. You can work on your tech, and out think your opponents. You can work on your military, and conquer your opponents. You can simply build up your culture, and out art your opponents. The best part is, though, that you can’t completely min/max. If you neglect your military, you will be stomped on. If you neglect your tech, you won’t be able to keep up with advances in the arts and military. If you neglect your arts, your people will be bored and displeased, and often revolt, riot, and things of that nature.

The second is the way that you draw cards. Every turn, based on things like what government you’re running, you have a certain number of moves. In front of all players is a bunch of cards dealt out. Each one is in either a one-point slot, a two-point slot, or a three-point slot. Taking a card costs as many moves as the point value. However, after each player’s turn, all cards move upward towards being cheaper, and you deal replacements on the bottom. This makes for amazing strategy. Do you take the card you want now, while it costs you multiple actions, or do you wait to get it for cheaper and hope your opponent doesn’t snag it? You can really plan ahead, and fuck up other players plans, with this setup, and I really like it.

Yeah, I’ve been having a really good time, and I certainly thank Stiv for forcing me into playing. It’s been great fun! In reality, though, I bet it’s less fun, because holy shit. There is so much bookkeeping in this game. But as an online play-by-electronic-mails thing, it’s pretty solid. I do recommend giving it a spin, if you can. Just be prepared for a huge learning curve.

Lately, my life has been lead by terror.

It’s weird, though. I have so much like… actual stuff I could be scared about. I have actual shit going on in my life. Transitioning, graduating… all this shit is terrifying, potentially.

But I’m getting panic attacks about not formatting informal notes correctly, not being early enough to have enough time to sit around and be early, or a non-important radio message not going through on the radio that never works anyway.

It is beyond stupid and I hate myself for it. But these are like… well, okay, I’ve had worst “attacks” in the past, but I seriously have to stop and just breathe for a bit to calm down, and I’m left with this sense of dread over the stupidest things until they’re done. I had to ask how to STUFF ENVELOPES like three times today because I had to head off the feeling of slightly stuffing an envelope with a flyer wrong before it made me even more useless than I already am.

Best guess is that I’m projecting issues related to passing onto all manner of other things in my life. I certainly know that I was projecting my anxiety about my shopping trip today onto Cara, when it was just a thing we were going to do, as far as she was concerned. I’m sure this stuff is fairly similar. I’m worried about some bullshit like “letting people down” with what I’m doing, and that translates into panicking about letting them down in dumb ways which would never happen. That makes a level of sense.

But dammit. It is frustrating. Makes me want to just sleep for a few days, or stay inside. Bleh.